Review: Mark of the Ninja brings 2D stealth with style

Subtle visual cues are key to a 2D sneaker's appeal.

Game Details

Developer: Klei EntertainmentPublisher: Microsoft Game StudiosPlatform: Xbox 360 (Live Arcade download)Release Date: Sept. 7, 2012ESRB Rating: MPrice: $14.99Links:Xbox.com
Games played from a third-person, 2D perspective are kind of weird when you think about it. You control a character that (usually) doesn't have the innate ability to see through walls or intuit the position of distant, unseen enemies. But since you, the player, have a complete view of the immediate area surrounding your character, you're able to give that character the seemingly preternatural ability to anticipate events that, logically, they shouldn't know about.

That kind of extra knowledge often has the subtle, almost unnoticed effect of making you and your character feel almost superheroically powerful, which probably explains a lot of the inherent appeal of the 2D perspective in gaming. But Klei Entertainment's Mark of the Ninja is notable particularly for the way it takes this kind of perfect knowledge away from the player, using a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle visual cues to represent the characters' limited knowledge of their surroundings to build one of the best implementations of stealth gameplay I've seen in 2D or 3D.

Mark of the Ninja is utterly defined by the lack of information it gives players in key situations. If you want to know if there's a guard in the next room, you have to lean up against the door and look through the keyhole (and be sure to dart away if he's about to open that door). If you want to know if you'll be spotted when you climb up over that ledge, you need to carefully peek your head up around the corner first. When you duck back down, a hazy, slowly fading red outline will tell you the guards' last observed position, but you can still track their movements by watching the small grey circles that represent their subtle footfalls.

The lack of information works both ways, though, and knowing exactly what the enemy guards can see and hear is crucial to getting through a level undetected. Again, the game uses some very natural visual cues to let you know exactly when you're hidden and when you might be spotted. Anything that makes a substantial amount of noise—from a startled flock of birds to a shattered overhead light to your own dashing footsteps—sends out a blue shock wave of sound that shows exactly which enemies will be potentially alerted to your presence. Similarly, gentle cones of light emanating from overhead lamps and guards' flashlights let you know exactly where and when you'll be safely hidden in the darkness.

Wandering dogs, meanwhile, emanate a purple "scent radius" showing where they'll be able to sniff you out, even if you're hiding behind a carefully placed planter. If you're spotted, heard, or smelled briefly, a pulsing yellow circle shows your suspected location, giving you a chance to quickly escape before your enemy can investigate and sound the alarm.

Mark of the Ninja gameplay trailer.

All of this information is pretty easy to glean with just a quick glance at the screen, and after a while you're able to get a detailed if incomplete tactical feel for your surroundings. You're not a superhero, but you are more informed and aware than a normal human probably would be in the same situation. You are, in other words, a highly trained ninja, and that's exactly how you feel playing the game.

There are limits to this feeling, though. The most important one is the way death gives you a more perfect knowledge of how a situation will play out. Getting spotted is supposed to be the ultimate penalty in a stealth game, and in Mark of the Ninja it rightly takes a significant 800 points off of your score (which increases based on your use of stealth and number of stylish kills). But thanks to a very generous checkpoint system, you can simply let yourself die and restart nearby with your score reset to where it was before the penalty. Meanwhile, you've gained first-hand knowledge of how not to handle a room.

The checkpoint system essentially lets you guess and check your way through the multiple potential solutions in each room, which is great for tinkering with the enemy AI and trying out weird ideas. Do you want to sneak under the guards and distract them by taking out the guy in the corner? Or do you want to throw a smoke bomb to distract the guards and block the sniper's scope as you dash through quickly? Maybe you'd rather sneak up behind one guard, kill him, and use his corpse to lure the other guard underneath a chandelier that you conveniently drop on his head.

But the lack of consequences does take away some of the tension that stealth games often do so well, by making discovery seem like more of an inconvenience than something to be avoided at all costs. It can also let you find the sometimes ridiculous limits of the enemy AI's abilities—more than once I was able to sneak up about two feet in front of a stationary guard's face and just leap over him without notice. Even in the pitch darkness, with super-ninja powers, that strained my suspension of disbelief somewhat.

Still, that doesn't take too much away from the joy of figuring out the optimal scoring solution to each intricate, trap-filled room. The game's scoring system encourages hunting down the significant number of hidden doodads in each level, and rewards you for careful, deliberate, nonlethal play (though for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get through some rooms without simply killing the guard that was in my way). Because of this, it feels more like a puzzle game than a stealth platformer in many ways.

But what I'll remember most about Mark of the Ninja isn't any individual puzzle, or a particularly tense moment, or any of the pathos-filled, hand-drawn cut scenes. I'll remember the way it made me feel more powerful by taking away some of the information I'd come to expect from a 2D game.

Verdict: Buy It

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl